The most frightening thing in Capcom’s new horror game Resident Evil Village is not the mutilated hand of protagonist Ethan Winters, nor the 9ft-tall Lady Dimitrescu with her razor-sharp fingers: it is Thomas the Tank Engine. Just days after the game’s official release, members of the online modder community, who hack games to alter graphics and gameplay, have already offered a raft of ludicrous additions to the game, including replacing the face of a baby with that of a grizzled soldier and swapping every monster in the game with Barney the Dinosaur.
Thomas is special for gamers, though. Since a modder first swapped the dragons of Skyrim for the cheery blue locomotive in 2013 (prompting legal threats from IP holder Mattel), he has been incongruously shoehorned into all manner of games. Most memorable was the mod that replaced Mr X, the mutant villain of Resident Evil 2, with a huge Thomas who stalks you with dead eyes, his theme tune jangling eerily in the background.
A mod is like the gaming form of a remix, a fan-made alteration which can range from small graphical tweaks to huge overhauls in gameplay. Modders edit games as a form of creative expression and an exercise in fandom. Some projects that start life as mods go on to become games in their own right, including some of the most influential titles in gaming history.